Beautiful book covers—just for you!

We’ve got you covered, IngramSpark customers! You’ve penned the next bestseller, so let’s sell it with a stunning cover. Start a Design Contest and get a custom book cover your readers love, guaranteed.

Mystery to memoir, we’ve got every genre covered (literally)

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Yeah, right. The difference between a sale and a fail is the front of your book. Luckily, our design community has created over 10,000 covers, including beautiful artwork for New York Times bestselling authors Tim Ferris and Rick Warren.

Start by telling us what you need

Your book cover design FAQs, answered

Everything you need to move to production. Your cover design will be uploaded in the correct formats to send to IngramSpark or Lightning Source.

Specifically, your winning designer will deliver a production-ready Adobe Illustrator file, Adobe Photoshop file, PDF file or EPS file. They will also supply visual mockups in PNG or JPG format for use on the web.

Plus, you’ll get the full legal copyright, so the design will be all yours.

Lots of ideas! If you’re looking for inspiration, explore 99designs for fantastic examples of product labels created by our design community.

Bring as many specifics as you can, too, like book cover dimensions, printing requirements and the information that needs to go on the front and back covers of your book. For the front cover this usually includes: title, author’s name, subtitle, tagline, imagery and a quote. For the back cover you may need an ISBN number, blurb, author’s biography and a quote.

The more you give the designers, the better they can design for you!

Yes. If you have any specific photography or images that need to be included on your book cover design, please submit them to designers with your brief.

Unless you request otherwise, your designer may also use stock images (purchased from a third party) in your design. If a designer uses stock art in a design, they’ll tell you which images they are and use watermarked versions of them in their entries. Once you choose the winning design, you’ll need to purchase the stock art and provide it to the winning designer so they can complete the design.

Absolutely. Our talented designers know how to produce book cover designs for all of the popular publishing services. Make sure you include this in your brief so designers know what specifications to work from. If you don’t know which one you’re using upfront, you can always add it into your brief later.

Typesetting—sometimes called book layout—describes how text and images are arranged on the interior pages of a book. It includes all of the headers, footers and main content of each page.

Currently we only offer contests for book cover design. However, if you are interested in typesetting for your book, we recommend that you work with your winning cover designer via a 1-to-1 project (for an additional cost).

On 99designs, designers agree to upload only original artwork, so each designer owns the rights to their design submissions until you choose your contest’s winner. At the end of the contest, the designer agrees to transfer the rights, and you become the owner of the copyright of an awesome new book cover that one else can use!

We guarantee that you’ll get a great book cover design at any pricing level, but our higher-priced packages give you more design options and better support.

Here’s how it works: When you pay more, the prize for the winning designer is bigger, too. More experienced designers participate in your contest, so you get more high-quality designs to choose from. More options means additional time that's needed to review your designs. That’s why our Gold and Platinum packages offer dedicated managers to help streamline that process by writing creative briefs and giving your designers feedback.

When selecting your book cover contest package, think about how much time you’ll have and what experience you have writing briefs and working with designers. If you're still unsure, contact us for a design consultation.

Choose “Make your contest private” from the Contest options section before you launch your book cover design contest. This will prohibit designers from using their designs elsewhere, and your contest will be un-searchable on the web.

This will automatically attach a standard NDA template to your contest. If you prefer, you can also upload your own NDA.

We offer a 100% money-back guarantee within 60 days of payment on all Book Cover Design Contests, except those with a guaranteed prize and those that have entered the Final Round. You can also call us anytime to help you rewrite your brief, reopen your project to ensure you get a good result and help you pick a winning design. Remember, if we refund your contest, you aren’t legally entitled to use any of the designs submitted to your contest.

Let’s talk!

Our kind, happy and humble customer support team would love to answer your questions. Send us an email or call to speak with an actual human.